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I don't want to jump for joy, but I can't help but sing along. I listened to it today actually!
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Welll... the song isn't so much about the '60s -- it's more about musicians who were around then.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Parts of it are about the 70s: "Drove my chevy to the levee but the levee was dry" = gas shortage.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Initially inspired by his memories of the death of Buddy Holly in 1959, ‘American Pie’ is autobiographical and presents an abstract story of Don McLean’s life from the mid 1950s until when he wrote the song in the late 1960s. It is almost entirely symbolised by the evolution of popular music over these years and represents a change from the lightness of the 1950s to the darkness of the late 1960s. This is also very symbolic of changing America during this era. In Don’s life the transition from light (the innocence of childhood) to the darker realities of adulthood probably started with the death of Buddy Holly and culminated with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 and the start of a more difficult time for America. In this 4 year period, Don moved from a fairly idyllic childhood existence, through the shock and subsequent harsh realities of his father’s death in 1961, to his decision in 1963 to quit Villanova University to pursue his dream and become a professional singer.
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In his 2000 'Starry Starry Night' video, Don says: I'm very proud of the song. It is biographical in nature and I don't think anyone has ever picked up on that. The song starts off with my memories of the death of Buddy Holly. But it moves on to describe America as I was seeing it and how I was fantasizing it might become, so it's part reality and part fantasy but I'm always in the song as a witness or as even the subject sometimes in some of the verses.
You know how when you dream something you can see something change into something else and it's illogical when you examine it in the morning but when you're dreaming it it seems perfectly logical.
So it's perfectly okay for me to talk about being in the gym and seeing this girl dancing with someone else and suddenly have this become this other thing that this verse becomes and moving on just like that. That's why I've never analyzed the lyrics to the song. They're beyond analysis. They're poetry."
Don has recently re-enforced this theme: "The song was written as my attempt at an epic song about America, and I used the imagery of music and politics to do that. Also, I was really influenced by the Sgt. Pepper album, and the American Pie album was my attempt to do that, but the song totally overshadowed the album."
quote: It is biographical in nature and I don't think anyone has ever picked up on that.
How could anyone not pick up on that? I mean, it's self-evidently biographical. The whole song is basically "My Childhood: An Allegory;" almost every line is a coded reference to a musical trend, political trend, or adolescent coming of age.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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"almost every line is a coded reference to a musical trend, political trend, or adolescent coming of age".
Almost every line is in reference to several events/trends/etc, not all of them contemporaneous with each other. It's especially noticible in how the meaning of the chorus shifts in response to the multiple times/ways in which "the day the music died".
Think in terms of dreamweaving: of images and events morphing into each other, with the unconscious mind scarcely noticing / not noticing that the transmutations themselves are oddities (which would certainly capture the attention of a conscious mind).
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Don said: "They're beyond analysis. They're poetry."
Tom wrote: "The whole song is basically "My Childhood: An Allegory;" almost every line is a coded reference to a musical trend, political trend, or adolescent coming of age."
Ha ha. I was thinking, OK, Don, the last thing I knew about poetry was that it can not only be analyzed, but analyzed to death, and that a great many professors have made a life for themselves doing just that.
And then I read Tom's post, and it made me chuckle.
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